


Funny in the cosmic sense

by Clocketpatch



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Estrangement, Gallifrey, Origins, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-02-14 02:32:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2174796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clocketpatch/pseuds/Clocketpatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But neither of them is laughing</p>
            </blockquote>





	Funny in the cosmic sense

The boy and his friend sat in a darkened alcove lit by the flickering of an artificial flame. It was meant as a place of meditation; a pseudo-ancient atmosphere where students could reflect on the truly ancient texts of the library. Wisdom of millennia distilled into beakers, scrolls, and data cubes.

 

A place where, in reality, students tasted smuggled contraband – caffeine, alcohol, kavalactones, and hallucinogens – from across space and history.

 

A place to quietly get high and contemplate philosophy, politics, and a future that had already been more or less planned.

 

"You could be a doctor," the boy's friend said.

 

He was making fun. Gallifrey didn't need doctors. The planet's children had been genetically engineered to perfect health for generations. Disease was unknown and near-immortality was the reward of those who donned the Time Lord cowl on graduation. There were a very few physicians, kept in storage (waiting for decades at a time in boring back rooms, out of the way), for treating freak accidents, injured Time Agents, and regeneration-addled hypochondriacs, but for the most part it was joke profession.

 

"Maybe I will," the boy said, raising his mug to his lips. His friend smiled and a downed his own mug.

 

Both were full of a muddy brown infusion from a distant class five planet. Weakly caffeinated. It tasted slightly mouldy. That could have been intentional, or it could have been due to poor storage conditions during transit. The boy wasn't certain if he liked it or not.

 

Both the boy and his friend were on track to become engineers – the most common degree program the Academy offered. Their futures were set. Even the small rebellion of tea had been calculated and accounted for.

 

They thought.

 

-

 

It was known, of course, what the boy would become.

 

The legend of _The Doctor_ was woven into the very threads of the universe. Tracing those threads backwards had proven troublesome, but the task had eventually been completed just as the boy – ignorant of his fate – had entered into the Academy on a basic scholarship.

 

The debate on what to do about him raged for years.

 

Yes, he was an innocent _now_ , but did that matter in comparison to the crimes he would commit in the future? Immediate execution by dispersal was clearly the most prudent option.

 

But wait!

 

With the timelines of his existence tangled so thick and tight around reality, wouldn't the boy's death at such an early age set off chain reactions of paradox?

 

Worse, what if such meddling was the trigger to set the Doctor on his course of empathy and destruction across the universe?

 

And so the pendulum of fate swung heavily back and forth.

 

-

 

A shout. A crash of metal on metal.

 

The boy's friend slammed into him, sending the boy reeling backward against the alcove's concrete wall, then sliding down, stunned, to sit on the cold floor. Both looked at the broken remains of a cart of data pads. Then they looked up, to the twisted railing of the overhanging balcony. Librarian drones were already buzzing in to survey the damage.

 

"That would have killed me," the boy said. His robes were damp with spilled tea, his face was pale with dust, and his left knee bled sluggishly from a cut inflicted by the shattered ceramic of his mug.

 

"Probably not," said his friend, dry, uninjured, and already brushing himself off, "but it would have hurt. Maybe even sent you for treatment."

 

"To a doctor?" the boy joked.

 

-

 

"Utterly unacceptable," said the Master of Council, looking down at the report.

 

The Master's advisor sighed, thumbing through statistical likelihoods. "It will be tried. It will be tried again, several times. Do you want them to succeed or not, is the question?"

 

The Master switched off his screen and rubbed his temples.

 

"Isn't that everyone's question, these days?"

 

-

 

"I think someone is trying to kill me," the boy said, after a fire ripped through his dorm room. All of his data and researches had been lost in the blaze. His marks would suffer.

 

"The balance of probability makes it unlikely," said the boy's friend, shuddering at the very thought of pre-meditated murder. Such things were so very… barbaric. Such things did not happen on Gallifrey.

 

"How would you explain this, then?" the boy said, gesturing at the metal fire wall which had dropped to seal off the boy's room from the rest of the Academy. The smoke alarm hadn't gone off before the quarantine protocols began. The boy's escape had been very fortuitous.

 

"Faulty wiring?" the friend suggested.

 

"And the cart? The food poisoning? The broken steps?" The boy listed off a litany of misfortune. The events of his life over the past few months sounded more like a slap-stick play than reality.

 

The friend gave another placating excuse, but in his mind, cogs were turning. The balance of probability for such angst _was_ tellingly unlikely…

 

-

 

The boy was watched, and, despite the indiscretions of some fanatically minded executionists, kept veiled from his own significance.

 

Of course, the boy knew the legend. Everyone _knew_. But he did not know his own part in it. There was no need to add that complexity into the mix of discussion and debate on what to do about his continued existence.

 

The boy's friend knew the legend as well.

 

And he was not so closely watched.

 

-

 

Graduation came and went. The boy and his friend were assigned to their new careers. The boy's was fairly menial. His brushes with death had left him undesirable. Instead of being assigned as an engineer he would spend most of his time sitting in lonely back rooms, waiting.

 

_Luck_ was not a word that was spoken out loud on Gallifrey, but suspicion and rumour lurked under the veneer of civilization. The boy was a dangerous asset. Disaster and expensive property damages followed wherever he went. The best thing to do with such a person was to keep them far out of the way.

 

His friend had no such baggage, and managed to secure a Council position within weeks of graduation.

 

"Congratulations," the boy said. He smiled. If he had any jealousy about their divergent fates, he kept it deeply pushed away.

 

"You were my inspiration," was his friend's cryptic response.

 

The boy continued smiling. Hard, rancorous, and gloriously happy for his friend's success.

 

-

 

Years later, in a darkened alcove lit by the flickering light of an artificial flame, the boy's friend told him a secret.

 

The friend was an advisor on the Council now, though many had started, with knowing winks and nods, to call him Master. His rise to power seemed unstoppable. A marvellous break from tradition for one to obtain so much, so young. He told the boy what he already knew:

 

"You have to leave Gallifrey. You aren't safe here."

 

"Obviously, someone is trying to kill me." The boy laughed and took a deep swallow of tea. The friend had seen this before: the only way the boy could keep the constant existential terror at bay was by being glib about it.

 

"Yes, they are," the friend said slowly, the old, bitter joke becoming harsh reality. "I know why."

 

The boy set down his mug. His hands shook slightly and the mug clicked across the polished not-wood of the alcove's table.

 

"That's not funny, _Master_."

 

The friend stayed calm, steady, even as the nickname was thrown back at him in another factitious attempt at making things normal. He'd chosen the wrong setting for this talk, the friend thought. He'd hoped that the (long since repaired) setting of the first attempt on the boy's life would drive home the seriousness of the threat. Instead, the boy was having a quiet emotional breakdown, searching futilely for ways to refute what his friend told him.

 

"Why?" the boy asked, "What's wrong with me? What do you know?"

 

How to answer those questions without accidentally influencing fate. He was doing too much as it was. Who knew where this meddling would lead?

 

_I know_ , the friend thought, grimly, and carried on anyway.

 

"You have to leave," the friend said. "Take your family with you, and go."

 

He reached across the table and took the boy's trembling hands in his own, held them, and met his eye. There were certain techniques of mind control taught to members of Council. Techniques which were treasonous to use without proper dispatch. The ultimate violation of another's free will and privacy.

 

"For the future, I am sorry," the friend said, the phantoms of what would be and how his own life and history would soon be torn apart and re-written throbbed against his moral reasoning of what _had_ to be done. "I'm doing this because I believe in you. Remember that, even when I change."

 

Because he would. The scryers had not yet been able to deduce the identity of the Doctor's dark shadow, but the friend had guessed his own fate a long time past. He did not know how he would change into a ghoul, only that it was inevitable.

 

He didn't want to know.

 

"Have you looked into your own future?" the boy asked, drawing his hands away in horror from the ultimate taboo.

 

The friend didn't answer, not verbally, but he maintained eye contact and screamed a single, hypnotic command:

 

_GO!_

 

And the boy did.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the estrangement prompt of H/C bingo 2014


End file.
